Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Evolution and Rationality

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Professor Paul Bloom: We began the course by talking about one of the foundational ideas of modern psychology. This is what Francis Crick described as "The Astonishing Hypothesis," the idea that our mental life, our consciousness, our morality, our capacity to make decisions and judgments is the product of a material physical brain. What I want to talk about today and introduce it, and it's going to be a theme that we're going to continue throughout the rest of the course, is a second idea which I think is equally shocking, perhaps more shocking. And this has to do with where mental life comes from, not necessary its material nature, but rather its origin. And the notion, this other "astonishing hypothesis," is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as Darwin's dangerous idea. And this is the modern biological account of the origin of biological phenomena including psychological phenomena.

Now, people have long been interested in the evolution of complicated things. And there is an argument that's been repeated throughout history and many people have found it deeply compelling, including Darwin himself. Darwin, as he wrote The Origin of Species, was deeply persuaded and moved by this argument from — in the form presented by the theologian William Paley. So, Paley has an example here. Paley tells — gives the example of you're walking down the beach and your foot hits a rock. And then you wonder, "Where did that rock come from?" And you don't really expect an interesting answer to that question. Maybe it was always there. Maybe it fell from the sky. Who cares? But suppose you found a watch on the ground and then you asked where the watch had come from. Paley points out that it would not be satisfying to simply say it's always been there or it came there as an accident. And he uses this comparison to make a point, which is a watch is a very complicated and interesting thing.

Paley is — was a medical doctor and Paley goes on to describe a watch and compare a watch to the eye and noticing that a watch and the eye contain multitudes of parts that interact in complicated ways to do interesting things. In fact, to change and to update the analogy a little bit, an eye is very much like a machine known as a camera. And they're similar at a deep way. They both have lenses that bend light and project an image onto a light-sensitive surface. For the eye the light-sensitive surface is the retina. For the camera it's the film. They both have a focusing mechanism. For the eye it's muscles that change the shape of the lens. For a camera it's a diaphragm that governs the amount of incoming light. Even they're both encased in black. The light-sensitive part of the eye and part of the camera are both encased in black. The difference is — So in fact, the eye and a camera look a lot alike and we know the camera is an artifact. The camera has been constructed by an intelligent — by intelligent beings to fulfill a purpose.

In fact, if there's any difference between things like the eye and things like a camera, the difference is that things like the eye are far more complicated than things like the camera. When I was a kid I had this incredible TV show called "The Six Million Dollar Man." Anybody here ever seen it or heard of it? Oh.